A method of the above kind is described in the paper by F. Jordan, M. Kutter, and T. Ebrahimi, “Proposal of a watermarking technique for hiding/retrieving data in compressed and decompressed video”, ISO/IEC document JTC1/SC29/WG11/MPEG97/M2281, of July 1997. In that document, the watermarking function is applied with the aid of a marking key. This is a binary word of 16 or 32 bits inserted into the motion vectors of the video signal, which motion vectors are obtained with the aid of an MPEG4 encoder. The number of motion vectors selected is the same as the number of bits in the marking key, i.e. 16 or 32 motion vectors are selected. Then, for each of the vectors selected, the corresponding bit of the marking key is inserted into one of the components of the motion vector, for example the vertical component, modifying its parity.
Unfortunately, that solution is not very robust, since the slightest attack can transform an even ordinate into an odd ordinate and vice-versa. Here, the term “attack” means malicious attacks and also non-malicious attacks such as compression or changing the spatial or the temporal format of the video signal. Moreover, by always modifying the same predetermined component of the selected motion vectors, for example the vertical component, that solution runs the risk of making the watermarking more visible in the video signal.